In a Dark Time (The Eye Begins to See) [11']

for horn and piano or horn and chamber orchestra

In a Dark Time cover

In a Dark Time Score

Joelle Wallach’s In a Dark Time (the eye begins to see) for horn and piano or chamber orchestra, was commissioned by the International Women’s Brass Conference for its opening concert of 2006. It was premiered there by Laurel Bennert Ohlson, Associate Principal Horn of the National Symphony Orchestra. Like the Theodore Roethke poem from which the title is taken, the music explores the revealing, redemptive power of times of psychic dark.

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.